While doing some optimization on Morpheus 2 and incorporating some of Red9‘s latest stuff I noticed an odd bottleneck in the code. So I decided to dig in to it.

For those short of time, the short of it:

Maya’s duplicate command get’s slower based on scene complexity – regardless of manually calling or doing it through the interface

Maya’s duplicate command (and perhaps others) get slower based on how long you’ve been doing stuff in maya

I noticed that a relatively simple step in one of my joint chain functions was oddly slow and delved into it. In a empty or lite scene it was pretty instantaneous but in a regular scene got really slow. Dug in and came to just being duplicate being slow. That was my theory at least , so I wrote series of tests to verify. The first of those being a test that given a number of times to iterate and a number of children joints, the test will 1) create a joint chain of y joints and 2) duplicate that root joint iterating on the provided number.

The results showed a pretty linear line of increasing speed as the scene added more objects. The more objects, the longer things got. Interesting but not enough to go on.

The second series of tests I wrote my own simple joint duplicate function using mc.joint and matching positioning, rotateOrder etc. I also checked some other items to eliminate those as possible hindrances or see if they affected speeds:

Undo – No difference whether it is on or off

History – No history on joints

Connections — Only connection on any tested joints in inverseScale

Flags — Tried all combinations on the duplicate command I could think of to no avail

My rewrite is always the same speed regardless of complexity, mc. duplicate get’s progressively slower as it goes on. Here are some results:

Note – the 2015 run was a fresh open of the software and my experience doing this testing would see that getting slower.

If you run the test you’ll see for yourself the slow down. Now, what do we do with this?Working through this I created my own duplicator for curves, joints and locators. For now, I’m only going to use the joint one for Morpheus building until I can do some more testing and maybe get a better handle on it but it’s certainly an oddity.

Odder yet is the longer you do stuff in Maya, duplicate gets slower still. This I tested after noticing that after being away a bit that Windows had rebooted and suddenly duplicate was posting much better results. After a while, that slowed down. So I rebooted myself and yup, it’s faster after a reboot. I have no idea on this one other than maybe a memory leak or..I dunno, I’m a hack at this stuff and that’s the best I got:)

If you’re interested, let me know what you find – different conclusions?